Meeting Minutes Template: Record Decisions and Actions, Not a Transcript

Meeting minutes record what a meeting did, not what everyone said. A template that works has five parts: the header (meeting, date, who attended and who chaired), the decisions made, the action items with one owner each, the questions left open, and the date of the next meeting. Each decision says who made it. Each action says who will do it and by when. Anything that is not a decision, an action or an open question usually does not belong in the minutes. The template, a board meeting variant and a way to turn the actions into tracked tasks are below.

What minutes must record

The Robert’s Rules of Order FAQ↗ (opens in a new tab) is blunt about it: “Minutes are a record of what was done at a meeting, not a record of what was said,” and summarizing the discussion is not just unnecessary but improper. That is written for formal assemblies, but it is the right rule for a team meeting too. Nobody rereads a debate three weeks later. They reread the minutes to find out what was agreed and whose job it is.

• Header: the name of the group, the date, the start and end time, who attended, who was absent, who chaired and who took the minutes.
• Decisions: each one as a single sentence, with who decided it. “Agreed” is not a decider; name the person or the group that had the authority.
• Action items: what will be done, one owner, and a date. Two owners means nobody owns it.
• Open questions: what the meeting could not settle, who will find out, and when it comes back.
• Next meeting: date and anything already on its agenda.

Leave out who argued for what, jokes, tangents and anything said in confidence. If a reason matters to a decision, write it in one clause after the decision: “Move the launch to October 14, because the payment provider’s review takes three weeks.”

How to take minutes during the meeting

• Open the template before the meeting starts and fill in the header while people arrive. It is the part nobody can reconstruct afterward.
• Write decisions and actions as they happen, not at the end. When the discussion moves on, read the line back: “So the decision is that Maria sends the plan names to legal by Wednesday?” Correcting it takes ten seconds then and an email thread later.
• When something sounds settled but nobody said who decides, ask. An unowned decision goes under open questions, with the name of whoever will find out.
• Keep a scratch line for anything you are unsure of and resolve it before the meeting closes. The last two minutes are for reading out the actions and their owners.
• Send the minutes the same day. Minutes that arrive a week later are argued with rather than acted on.

Taking minutes is a job, so it should not rotate to whoever is chairing. The chair runs the discussion; someone else writes. On a small team, rotating the minute-taker each week spreads the load and teaches everyone what a clear decision sounds like.

A meeting minutes template with action items

# [Group or meeting name]: minutes
Date: [Month day, year]   Time: [start] to [end]
Chair: [name]             Minutes: [name]
Present: [names]
Absent: [names]

## Decisions
1. [One sentence.] Decided by: [person or group]. Reason: [one clause, if it matters]
2. [One sentence.] Decided by: [person or group].

## Action items
- [ ] [Verb first: what will be done] | Owner: [one name] | By: [Month day]
- [ ] [Verb first: what will be done] | Owner: [one name] | By: [Month day]

## Open questions
- [The question] | Who will find out: [name] | Back at: [meeting or date]

## Next meeting
[Month day, year]. Carried over: [items]

The template is plain text, so it pastes into Word, Google Docs or a wiki without losing its shape. If you want a meeting minutes template in Word, paste it into a blank document and turn the headings into Word heading styles; that is all a Word template adds.

A filled example

# Website team: minutes
Date: September 22, 2026   Time: 10:00 to 10:30
Chair: Maria   Minutes: Sam
Present: Maria, Sam, Priya, Tom
Absent: Jordan

## Decisions
1. The new pricing page ships with the October release, not before.
   Decided by: Maria. Reason: legal has not approved the plan names.
2. The contact form stays on the old spam filter until the new one is tested.
   Decided by: Priya.

## Action items
- [ ] Send the plan names to legal for approval | Owner: Maria | By: Sep 24
- [ ] Test the new spam filter on the staging site | Owner: Tom | By: Sep 29
- [ ] Fix the broken footer link on mobile | Owner: Sam | By: Sep 23

## Open questions
- Do we keep the annual plan toggle? | Who will find out: Priya | Back at: Sep 29

## Next meeting
September 29, 2026. Carried over: annual plan toggle.

Board meeting minutes template

Minutes of a board of directors are a legal record, not just a team habit, and the rules come from your state’s corporation law and your own bylaws. As one example, the Delaware General Corporation Law, Title 8, Section 142↗ (opens in a new tab), says that one of the officers “shall have the duty to record the proceedings of the meetings of the stockholders and directors in a book to be kept for that purpose,” and Section 141(f) says that written consents to act without a meeting are filed with the minutes.

For tax-exempt organizations, the IRS asks on Form 990 whether the organization contemporaneously documented every meeting and written action of its governing body. The Form 990 instructions↗ (opens in a new tab) explain that documentation can include “approved minutes, email, or similar writings that explain the action taken, when it was taken, and who made the decision,” and that contemporaneous means by the later of the next meeting or 60 days afterward. That list, action, date and decider, is a good test for any minutes.

# [Organization name]: minutes of the board of directors
Meeting type: [regular / special / annual]
Date: [Month day, year]   Place or method: [address / video call]
Called to order: [time] by [chair]
Directors present: [names]     Directors absent: [names]
Also present: [officers, staff, guests]
Quorum: [present / not present], per [bylaw section]
Secretary: [name]

## Approval of prior minutes
Minutes of [date] approved [as written / as corrected].

## Resolutions and votes
1. RESOLVED, that [exact wording].
   Moved by [name], seconded by [name].
   Vote: [for] for, [against] against, [abstain] abstaining.
   Recusals: [name, and the stated conflict, if any]

## Reports received
- [Report], presented by [name]. [Attached / on file at ...]

## Action items
- [ ] [What] | Owner: [name] | By: [Month day]

## Adjournment
Adjourned at [time].
Signed: [secretary], [date approved]

Check the variant against your bylaws before you use it, and ask your attorney about anything that looks unusual. Bylaws often say who signs minutes, how conflicts are recorded and how long records are kept, and they take precedence over any template.

Turning action items into tasks with an owner

Action items in a document get done when someone remembers the document. They get done more reliably when each one becomes a task on the board the team already works from, filed straight after the meeting by the person who took the minutes. In fenbs, Add many turns a pasted list into tasks in one step. Paste the action items as a Markdown list; lines indented under an item become that task’s note, and a line can start with bug:, feature: or enhancement: to set its kind.

- [ ] Send the plan names to legal for approval
      Owner: Maria. By September 24. From the website team meeting, September 22.
- [ ] Test the new spam filter on the staging site
      Owner: Tom. By September 29. Old filter stays until this passes.
- [ ] bug: Footer link is broken on mobile
      Owner: Sam. By September 23.

Be clear about two limits. fenbs has no assignee field and no due dates, so the owner and the date go in the note, as above, where everyone reads them. Every task shows its history, so you can see who filed it and who moved it. Project, category, lane and priority are set once for the whole batch, and everything is previewed before anything is created.

Decisions go somewhere you can find them

A decision buried in the minutes of September 22 is found by the person who remembers which meeting it was. In fenbs, decisions go on the Decisions and rules page instead. Each has its own ref, such as DEC-004, the question, what was decided, why, who decided and on what day, and a task can link the decisions it depends on. A decision that holds from now on, such as “never ship pricing changes without legal approval”, is recorded as a rule, and every connected AI assistant reads the rules before it starts work. The decider is always a person; an assistant can write a decision down, but never make one. Open questions from the minutes go on the same page as open decisions, so the queue of what is waiting on someone is in one place.

If an AI note taker drafts your minutes, the same template applies, and so does checking every line before it is filed. The sister guide on AI meeting note takers covers what the tools do and where they go wrong. A Claude skill that sorts pasted notes into actions and decisions is in Claude skills for project management.